Suu’s cautious dawn

TIME seized the auspicious moment to focus on Myanmar’s rock stars — yes, they do exist. It wrote about Zaw Win Htut, who drives a cherry red Chevy Impala and has enough money to be considering sending his daughter to an Australian boarding school.

He is the biggest rock star the country has ever produced. He writes his own songs, mainly ballads of lost love, and several have the word ‘dream’ in the title. He knows he can’t perform more provocative material. He must subject his songs and his lyrics, even the length of his hair, to the military’s scrutiny.

When India met Israel

This is not the West Bank’’, said TIME. ‘‘This is Ahmedabad, the city where Mohandas Gandhi set up his ashram…’’ Two months after the violence drew international attention, the western media is still to arrive at a vocabulary that fits Gujarat. Can the land that once cradled the Gandhian dream be tidily slotted as ‘India’s own Beirut’? Is it possible to fully explain Gujarat’s horror with reference to a distant conflict in the Middle East, one the West is more clued into? Isn’t the struggle to understand often forsaken for images of convenience?

TIME wasn’t inhibited by such questions. The magazine sounded chillingly certain that the young Muslims from Gujarat’s camps and ghettos ‘‘now look and think like their Palestinian counterparts’’. All the ingredients are there, it said: state oppression, poverty, disadvantage, wholesale discrimination, fertile recruiting grounds in the camps and ghettos, a ready weapon supply. ‘‘The calls for intifadeh and jihad have started… All that is lacking is a Hamas or al Qaeda.’’

Kitsch and tell

Bollywood mania is beginning to infect the UK this summer. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage extravaganza ‘Bombay Dreams’ opens next month but Bollywood films and Bollywood-inspired fashion are already on a roll. The British Film Institute’s Imagine Asia package opened with two 1950s films — Pather Panchali and Mother India. To one pensive critic, the ‘contemplative humanism’ of Pather Panchali served up a reminder of another kind of Indian film-making that has perhaps fallen from favour, if not forgotten entirely. But for another, when the aged Radha in Mother India is finally prevailed upon to open the new dam, though she is wary of the modern technology, it was impossible not to think of Arundhati Roy.

But seriously, the hype and the hoopla — is it just the British over-indulging their taste for kitsch? Or has Bollywood finally earned itself a cross-over status?

With Lagaan reopening this week in New York at the distinguished Film Forum in South Village, THE NEW YORK TIMES advised its audience to leave their condescension at home. Because ‘‘Lagaan may look naive; it is anything but’’. This movie goes about pleasing a broad popular audience with ‘‘savvy professionalism and genuine flair’’. Aamir Khan’s ‘‘pouty smouldering good looks’’, the ‘‘erotic centre’’ of the film, undoubtedly have something to do with the effusiveness. But it may be something more. The NYT announced that coming on the heels of Baz Luhrmann’s Bollywood-influenced Moulin Rouge, Lagaan seems to confirm the globalisation of the genre.

But Bollywood’s hallmark exuberance may be paling, recently warned Lee Server, author of ‘Asian Pop Cinema: Bombay to Tokyo’, in American weekly THE VILLAGE VOICE. He saw a shift towards films that are self-consciously restrained and polished. ‘‘Now they look identical to a J.Lo video. A growing sophistication has come there, an Americanisation’’?

America’s date with a scam

Amid the muddy swirl of allegations in Coffingate, here’s proof that profiteering from disaster is not an uniquely Indian trait.

NEWSWEEK sounded amazed at what lobbyists and politicians in the US are selling as crucial to the war on terror. California date farmers led a massive push to send their fruit to Afghanistan — they argued that dates were essential to aid starving Afghans. Canny senators are reframing old requests in the new language of homeland defence. The farm subsidy programme — the Agricultural Act of 2001 — was renamed the Farm Security Act. Alabama Republican Terry Everett insisted that a $3.5 billion subsidy for peanut farmers ‘strengthens America’s national security’. The milk lobby won millions in subsidy for dairy farmers to protect the ‘security’ of the nation’s milk supply. Post 9-11, a $4.5 billion funding bill for Amtrak, the crisis-ridden national passenger railway, is called the National Defense Rail Act.

Really, why single out poor Bush for advancing his agenda of increased military spending in the name of 9-11?